Churches know–and research confirms–that passionate faith won’t
pass on to the next generation without a strong partnership with
families. But how do we effectively reach and minister to families?
That’s a question churches are grappling with-especially when the
shape and makeup of families today is more varied and dynamic than
ever before. Research organizations estimate that nearly 50 percent
of marriages end in divorce, and more than 1 in 3 children live
apart from their biological fathers.

One faith-based organization is working hard to bolster churches’
efforts by helping them meet the specific needs of boys growing up
without male role models. The Mentoring Project (TMP), which exists
to inspire and equip the faith community to provide positive male
role models to boys between the ages of 7 and 14, has developed an
out-of-the-box approach to provide support for the sons of single
moms. This nonprofit organization based in Portland, Oregon, works
to provide 10,000 mentors for the sons of single moms nationwide.
Children’s Ministry Magazine caught up with the founder of TMP-New
York Times best-selling author Donald Miller-and John Sowers, TMP’s
president, to find out about their unique vision for family
ministry.

Q: Don, TMP seems to have been born out of writing your
best-selling books To Own a Dragon and A Million Miles
in a Thousand Years. How did TMP come about?

Miller: When I was writing To Own a
Dragon, which was about growing up without a father, I began
to realize that the issue of fatherlessness needed more than a
book. Out of that realization, The Mentoring Project was
born.

Q: The TMP logo features-of all things-elephants. What do
elephants have to do with mentoring?

Miller: I learned a great deal about myself while
watching a documentary a few years ago about elephants in a
wildlife trust in Africa. There were 25 elephants, all of them
orphans, and they’d been brought to the trust 20 years earlier.
They were becoming teenagers-in elephant years. The young females
were well-adjusted, getting along with the other elephants, but
there were a few young males who were causing a great deal of
trouble because they’d gone into extended musth cycles, an annual
phase of heightened aggressiveness.

The narrator in the documentary said the elephant musth cycle
begins in adolescence, and normally lasts only a few days. But
among these male orphans, the musth cycle was disrupted and had
become unusually long. These elephants were taking out their
aggression on rhinos that bathed at a local mud pool. A young male
elephant would slowly lumber down to the pool, enter near a rhino,
then spear it through the side with his tusks. The elephant would
then lean his gargantuan forehead into the head of the rhino,
holding the beast underwater until it drowned. The filmmakers
followed these orphan elephants, who were always on their own, as
they staggered about the wildlife refuge, fueled by pent-up and
misplaced aggression.

Occasionally, two young elephants in musth would meet, and the
encounter was always violent, going so far as to uproot trees in
the fray of their brawl. When both beasts, bloodied, lumbered their
separate ways alone-without a family, without a tribe-I couldn’t
help but identify. I’ve never killed a rhino, or much of anything
for that matter, but there have been times in my life when I didn’t
know exactly how to be. I sometimes experienced feelings of anger,
depression, or raging lust, and I was never sure what any of it was
about. I just felt like killing somebody, or sleeping with some
girl, or decking another guy, and I didn’t know what to do with any
of those feelings. Life was a confusing series of emotions rubbing
against events. I wasn’t sure how to manage myself, how to talk to
a female, how to build a career, how to-well, how to be a
man.

To me, life was something you had to stumble through alone. It
wasn’t something you enjoyed or conquered, it was something that
happened to you, and you didn’t have a whole lot of say about the
way it turned out. You just acted out your feelings and hoped you
never got caught.

Q: In terms of TMP, what is a
mentor? What does a mentor do?

Miller: In the most basic form, a mentor is
simply a friend or teacher. For TMP, a mentor is someone who loves,
models, and teaches the love of Jesus to a mentee. A major part of
mentoring is just faithfully showing up. But mentoring is more than
just “hanging out”; it’s loving a boy unconditionally. It’s
connecting with him, listening to him, laughing with him. It’s
looking for teachable moments and engaging those moments with
sensitivity and biblical intentionality.

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Children's Ministry Magazine is the MOST read magazine for children's ministry. It's packed with practical, authentic ministry ideas to help you become even better at what you do best—lead kids to Jesus. You'll get sound advice and encouragement from today's children's ministry experts, plus hundreds of ideas that'll have kids begging to come back! Available in print and in digital!